Big Damn Questions: Niska
by Daeleniel Shadowphyre
Summary: POV: Round Six of the LiveJournal Community "Big Damn Questions" Challenge. Glimpes into the mind of Adelei Niska.
1. Children of Our Fears

Title: Children of Our Fears Author: Daeleniel Shadowphyre Characters: Adelei Niska Rating: PG Challenge: Round 6, Challenge 1: Describe your greatest childhood fears or nightmares.  
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon is my god; I merely worship at the temple of his greatness with my humble offerings.  
Warnings: Potential head trip.

"If appearances are deceitful, then they do not deserve any confidence when they assert what appears to them to be true." --Diogenes La?tius, "Pyrrho"

I was born in space.

It is not a fact widely known, nor is it one I would express much pride in knowing the truth of. After all, when the Alliance has done so much to terra-form countless moons and planets for our occupation, it behoves us to bear out our gratitude and find our homes beneath their rule, does it not? Not so. If you were poor, at best you could expect a place out on the newly defined Rim, where it was best if you could till the land or tend the herds. My father had no such skills, for he, too, had been born in space and clung to that most present source of unstable stability.

As a child, I thought as a child and spoke as a child. Often, I did not understand such things as "restricted access". The ship on which I was born and called my home was my playground; why, then, should any place be closed to me? How foolish are the thoughts of children, and how arrogant.

Accidents may come in many forms. Some are small, easily overlooked. Some are on a far grander scale and lead one into similar accidents of magnificent devastation. In youthful ignorance, I was often swept up in the smaller accidents, heedless and unknowing of how such accidents might collect upon each other to create a higher level of destructive chaos. A misplaced toy amid the components of the ship's engine catching within the wires, constant movement working in consistent effort to strip protective casings from the wires until steel touched to copper and sparked most reactively.

I knew none of this. As young as I was, all I was given to understand was that something had gone horribly wrong and my home was about to destroy itself. My father, his small crew and I could barely squeeze aboard our single emergency shuttle. As we were propelled out into the Black, I could not help but press my face against the viewport for a last look at my home.

Have you ever seen a spaceship explode? I understand that there are many films from Earth-That-Was which present images of exploding spaceships much as such a ship would explode while planet-bound amid a stable atmosphere. Such images are quite unlike the true experience of seeing, with your own eyes, as a ship you once called home explodes in space.

First, there is a great feeling of pressure. Real or imagined, I do not know. Cracks and fissures cover the surface of the ship, breaking it into pieces. Brief, all too brief flares of fire highlight these crumbling segments of metal as what oxygen as was aboard is quickly consumed and the flames are smothered by the crushing Black. Then the shockwave comes, an expanding sphere of pressure releasing out to press apart the pieces of the ship and anything still within range, then collapsing back in on itself as the pressure dissipates, leaving only floating shrapnel and twisted, broken metal behind as a testimony to what once was.

Had this been the end of it, perhaps in time the image would have faded from my mind as years so often fade the memories of childhood. Alas that this was not to be. As we hung suspended in the darkness, each left to our own thoughts before we would begin our trek towards the nearest inhabited moon, the wreckage of our vessel was discovered. In my naivety, I pointed out the approaching ship to my father. His response when he beheld the strange and hulking ship with many spikes and stains of red across the hull will haunt me for the rest of my life.

"Reavers."

I had not seen my father afraid until that moment, nor any of the crew. Fear was something beyond the realm of concern for such strong men. Or so I thought. Silence descended, a horrifying, pressing silence that arrested all attention upon that single ship. None of us dared speak a word, not even I. My father held me up against his chest, and I could feel the chill of the knife he carried press against my shirt. As young as I was, I had no understanding that my father would have killed me then before we could be taken alive had we been discovered. The press of the knife held me still against him, eyes locked upon the ship as it floated slowly, so very slowly past the wreckage.

It seemed in my young mind a lifetime passed before the Reaver ship was gone, leaving behind a broken wreck of a former home, a silent and shaken crew in a barely working shuttle, and a little boy whose world and meagre understanding of universal truth had crumbled with the ship. The Black was not an all-encompassing playground any longer. It was a dark, cold, fearful thing that reached with icy hands to claim those foolish enough to think that they could dominate it.

Lessons learned in fear remain long with the young. To this day, though I make my home and business high above planetary atmosphere, enclosed safely in my space-faring station, the Black is still my enemy. Its calm appearance belies the horrors and destruction of its denizens. Such is the nature of fear, of seeing the truth of danger in what was once perceived as safe. There is no such thing as "safe" beyond what you are strong enough to create for yourself.

Irrational? Perhaps. We are all children of our fears, moulded and shaped at will by that which threatened us. I have lived my life by this well-learned truth, and here I am. A master of my fate defined by my fears and so determined to rule them before allowing them to rule me.

I wonder... Do your fears define you as well? 


	2. In Her Stead

**Title:** In Her Stead

**Series:** Big Damn Questions: Niska

**Author:** Daeleniel Shadowphyre

**Feedback:** darkone2813 (at) mindspring (dot) com

**Fandom:** Firefly

**Genre:** General

**Rating:** PG

**Challenge:** Round 6, Challenge 2: Describe your mother. What was she like and how did she shape you

**Character:** Adelei Niska

**Warnings:** Standard Shadowphyre Warnings apply. Potential head trip.

**Disclaimer:** Firefly and related characters and themes belong to Joss Whedon. This is a non-profit work of fiction.

**Distribution:** Ask, and ye shall receive.

* * *

"Everyone who enjoys thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed.≈Herein lies the difference between them that create and them that enjoy."

--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, "Maxims"

* * *

Strange that you should ask about my mother. I never knew her, not while she was alive. Sonya Adeleine Niska, by all accounts, was a petite woman with thick black hair and a piercing, flinty gaze. I am told I resemble her. My father once said I have her temperament, but I wonder if he ever truly knew her, either.

She met my father in space, all but passing ships in the Black between one struggling Core world and another. To hear my father speak of it, he fell in love when first they met face to face. I somehow doubt this was the case, whether it be some special sense for falsehood or the snickers from his crew whenever he told the story I do not know. And to be sure, he told the story often.

Nevertheless, my mother was with him for three years before I was conceived. What must be understood is that, given the uncertainty of gravity and protection from the cosmic radiation of the nearby suns unbuffered by the atmospheric veils of planets or terra-formed moons, taking into account the as yet still experimental structural integrity of the ships of the age, the conception and bearing of children while in space was most hazardous if not deemed impossible. My father never speaks of the many times they must have tried and failed to produce children before my coming.

To hear the crew speak of it, my mother was an unholy terror while she carried me. Her moods were volatile enough without the stress of hormones put her under. Father was constantly nagging to stop on one moon or planet "until the babe is born", but my mother would have none of it.

"You wooed me among the stars, won me among the stars, wed me among the stars; now I shall whelp among the stars as well."

This is the only direct quote I've ever heard of my mother, and as often as the crew repeated it, word for word and in high, strident mimic of my absent mother, I feel I can trust the veracity of the account as much as I trust when my father's crew would say she cursed the stars and my father to high Heaven when she gave me birth.

Beyond the stories of those three years and the memories of a worn and faded photograph, I have nothing of my mother but her name and mine. Everything that she left behind went up when Icarus lost its wings in swiftly stifled flames. She loved the stars, sought to conquer them, and was consumed by them. Pity she could not see her son grow up to conquer them in her stead-- the child going on to accomplish the dreams his parents failed to realise.

Yes... how strange that you should ask about my mother.

I must ask her someday if she is proud of me.


	3. More Than a Man

**Title:** More Than a Man

**Series:** Big Damn Questions: Niska

**Author:** Daeleniel Shadowphyre

**Feedback:** darkone2813 (at) mindspring (dot) com

**Fandom:** Firefly

**Genre:** General

**Rating:** PG

**Challenge:** Round 6, Challenge 3: Have you ever had a teacher who changed your life? When and how?

**Character:** Adelei Niska

**Warnings:** Standard Shadowphyre Warnings apply. Potential head trips and mentions of violence.

**Disclaimer:** Firefly and related characters and themes belong to Joss Whedon. This is a non-profit work of fiction.

**Distribution:** Ask, and ye shall receive.

* * *

_"Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies."_

--Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)

* * *

I am not a violent man by nature.

I see you do not believe me. I speak truth, however strange and perhaps incredible it may seem to you. It was a long and searching road which led me to become the man I am. Are you familiar with Shang Yu?

Quite the poet of his age. Some say he was psychotic, but then it has also been said that true genius is always brushed with madness. Such must have been true for Shang Yu; his twists of prose and turns of phrase outlined and defined a brutal and unyielding mindset by which he dictated supreme law.

"Live with a man forty years. Share his house, his meals, speak on every subject. Then tie him up and hold him over the volcano's edge, and on that day, you will finally meet the man."

A strange image, to be sure, especially for those whom have never seen a volcano. Yet the core teaching is there. You can live your life side by side with another and never know that person as truly as you would if you could push him to his limits and threaten all that he is. The same can be said of yourself as well.

The Alliance is a firm and most controlling master. Unconcerned with much that is beneath their notice, but press their limits and they are absolute in their suppression-- or so they would have you believe. If it were true, do you really believe I would be alive today?

There is a school in the Core. It is a school for those who are truly gifted, not merely with such things as intelligence or craftsmanship, but firm and resolute conviction. Within that school, they seek out what is at the heart of each student and mould that core, the student's inner self, into their own desired shape. The training is harsh and rigorous, stripping each student of everything they are, even their name... until all that is left is that conviction.

In my own studies, I was challenged most when asked what I believed in. What could I say? I had already had my childhood beliefs shattered before my eyes in such a way as to discourage forming others. I had no belief, not even in God. My instructors despaired of me, for while I had potential for great conviction, I lacked any concept through which to focus it.

One instructor refused to give up on me. Like the students, he had no name. If asked, he would say that he did not exist, for such was what would be expected of each student to pass through the school. He took me out one day, up to the very top of the building that housed the school. My hands were tied behind me and my feet bound with thick cords. For a long time, we stood atop that building, staring at each other. I did not speak; I had been too well trained. He told me that he had wanted to meet me for some time. And then he pushed me off the building.

I fell, helpless to prevent it. Images flashed before my eyes and I was once again a scared little boy who stood against his father's chest in a battered shuttle as death flirted past. I felt the cold of the wind rush over me and turn my soul to ice, just as the sight of that hulking red-stained ship had done. And then, all of a sudden, I was jerked up by my ankles, and I swung, suspended by nothing more than the cords that bound me.

And I was back on the Icarus, running through the corridors and knowing with a certainty that filled my child-self in all ways that I was home. I knew, without a doubt, that my father was waiting ahead of me in the cargo bay. My heart was so light in that moment that I knew if I stepped just that much more surely, I would lift up and fly. I _believed_. That feeling, so intense and pure, made me laugh aloud from the sheer joy of being free and safe and alive. I knew what it was to believe again.

When I was hauled up from over the side of the building, my instructor was waiting for me. He said nothing as my feet were unbound and my hands freed. He only watched me, watching as I struggled to regain my breath, unable to quiet the last traces of my laughter. And then he smiled, offered me his hand, and said that it was nice to meet me.

A man can do terrible things when he is pushed beyond his limits. He has met himself and made a certain peace with what he has found there. He has, in a sense, become more than just a man. He is the physical formation of his belief, his conviction. All else is secondary. I wonder, at times, if the alliance knew what they were creating when they remade me in their image of perfection. Some people do not survive the meeting of themselves, but perhaps that is how it is meant to be. Not everyone is meant to meet himself as I have met myself and live to tell the tale.

So. Perhaps, today, we shall meet _you_. Hm?


End file.
